To Feel Alive
by saoulbete
Summary: Ofdensen's the man with the plan, and a man on a mission. But it doesn't mean that sometimes he doesn't wonder what his life will be like otherwise.


A/N this is another thing found on an old penname and reposted. And kinda really really want to revisit this idea I have kicking around about a Metalocalypse/Rizzoli&Isles x-over after re finding this. Touched briefly on it in _Five Dates Jane Saved Maura From_ but I played it more for comedy...kinda wanna do like, a semi-serious (as serious as anything with a Metalocalypse x-over can be) take on things. This is set between s2 and s3.

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He stumbles into the shitty little hostel room in a shitty little third world country, happy to simply have a bed to sleep on. There's a bottle of cheap liquor on the nightstand, and he grabs it, taking a long swig without even bothering to reach for a glass, watching as the bubbles float to the surface. It burns, and it burns a lot as it goes down his throat, but it feels good. Burning is a good thing. Burning means he's still alive. Burning means that he can still feel, although he knows if he keeps drinking like this, in an hour or so, he won't. He would get that drunk, but when he's sloppy he sleeps like the dead, and he can't afford to do that.

He pulls off his boots, and looks at them for a long moment. They're old. Decades old, and the uppers show it. Battered, beaten black leather, pitted with all sorts of scars. They've been resoled more than once, but they're so well broken in that he wouldn't trade them for the world, until they finally fell apart on him. They've seen him through anything and everything. They saw him through the shit work he took to get a law degree-the better part of a decade of fast food. They saw him through a barroom brawl or two when he started getting into music management. And now, they were seeing him through what had been the most exciting three months of his life.

He takes another long swig of the liquor before leaning back on the pillows. He's never even bothered to turn on the light, and simply lies there on top of the covers, too tired to even slide between them. While gunfights on the backs of motorcycles across one-lane roads stretched across mountains were exhilarating, once the adrenaline wore off, they tended to leave one exhausted. As he stares at the stucco ceiling, illuminated by a dim light that slides through the curtains, he wonders if maybe he would have been better off managing fast food.

He hadn't really minded it all that much, after all. It paid the bills. It gave him spending money when he started with it in high school. And even though he'd gotten a scholarship for his undergrad at BCU, Boston was expensive. And it had been easy enough to request a transfer from his store to one closer to campus. It was a job that he knew how to do, and knew how to do well. The hours may not have been great, and the pay was shit compared to anything he'd make with a bachelors, much less his JD, but there are times that he thinks that the mindless monotony of deep friers and drive-through windows are just what he needs to stay sane.

It was a management job where he didn't risk getting killed, and didn't have to deal with multi-national conspiracies. It had been a management job where he did not have to worry about five lives that could not survive without him. It had been a management job where he was use to people working while intoxicated, but where he could fire them for being assholes while high. It had been one where years of martial arts training, fencing, hours at gun range were the hobbies of a man trying as hard as he could to prove he was not entirely a nerd. It had been a time where his only concerns were ticket times and somehow winding up with a fully staffed shift. He'd even take one of the ugly company polos, standardized across an entire nation over the endless amounts of black neoprene. It was a time where he could fantasize about SERE training, and before he realized he'd gotten good enough at this shit that it's now second nature to him.

But no, instead of a life of monotonous mediocrity, making enough to cover his bills, but not nearly enough to really enjoy himself, he had picked the money over his own happiness and sanity. He'd worked full time while putting himself through BCU and Harvard. So he found the one thing that was guaranteed to ensure him the same crazy hours-he can't remember what sleep-real, proper sleep-is. He's used to two hour power-naps, letting his body heal itself as much as it could. It's surprising how efficiently the human body reacts to constant stress. The endless adaptation methods-they fascinate him. He knows he's likely to die young, and that it will be on anything but his terms. He can't keep this up forever, there was going to eventually be the one day he'll be sloppy but not lucky. It will be one punch-telegraphed, even-that will allow an opponent to get the upper hand. And he knows that once he loses the upper hand, he will lose his life.

He wonders where he would be if he'd stuck with the working-class world. A decent house, somewhere. Nothing fancy. Three bedrooms, a living room, and a tiny little yard. Maybe he'd live by the shore. He'd likely be married by now, with at least one heir to the Ofdensen name. He'd be living a happy, healthy _normal_ life. Maybe he'd go on to teach fencing to impoverished youths, something to keep him sane from the scent of grease that never quite gets out from under you nose by the time you have to go back to work, no matter how hard you scrub. To a life measured to the second, and ruled by a sequence of beeps-one for the frier, a different one for the grill. A third for the register. He knew what they all meant, and he wonders when it was that he stopped being able to remember what each beep sounds like.

He tries to recall the sounds of anything but a thousand amplifiers blaring into his eardrums, day after day after day. He tries to recall what _music _sounds like. The time in his life where the term "guitar god" referred to Lindsey Buckingham, or, perhaps, Steve Vai. Now the only thing he can think of when he thinks of guitars are Skwisgar and Toki, and he wonders if anyone, anywhere, will ever think of anything else when they hear the term. He wonders when he went from a crazy motherfucker, who thought that the nonstop hours of following a band around, and handling all their business sounded like fun to the leader behind an empire. And that's what Dethklok is, in every sense of the word.

He tosses on the bed, one arm gripping the side of the mattress, feeling his back uncoil as he stretches, but as much as he tries, there's that spot square in the middle of his back that feels as though it needs to crack but won't. He'd found a Klokateer that knew just how to crack a back, knew just how to get that feeling of tension out, and he found himself wanting nothing more than to be back in his office, hitting 9 on his speed-dial, and waiting for the nameless, faceless figure to come by and in the span of five minutes erase five days worth of tension. He turns again, face down against the pillow, one hand buried beneath it, resting comfortably on the gun that he keeps there.

He's not sure if he's slept since he'd plotted his way out of his own death. It had been a rather fortuitous event, he figures. The sort of idea that only a man who straddles the line between genius and insanity could come up with, while laying broken and battered on the ground. Pain meant nothing to him, anymore. He's come to enjoy pain, because pain means that he is alive. Pain goes away. There are stretches of an hour or two that are a complete void in his memory, where he assumes he's passed out, sheer exhaustion taking over him, but he can't remember anything resembling a proper sleep since slipping out of the infirmary, a Klokateer that looked enough like him to pass for him while beaten and battered strapped to the table instead, with a lethal dose of morphine running through the man's veins.

At first, he'd been too busy figuring out what the proper first step to take was, who to go after first. The man who'd almost killed him had seemed like a decent starting point, but that man had to be working for someone. And he's always believed in starting from the top. If you cut off the head, the rest of the body will crumple. Instead, he'd found himself running around the globe, in search of what information he could find on this mysterious Tribunal. He sweet-talked information out of who he could, and beat it out of who he couldn't. But now, now he's too busy worrying about his life, and more importantly, how the boys are doing without him. He's kept up with the news, and by all accounts, things are not going well. He knows that their contract expires in less than a year, and he knows he has to be back before that-has to find some way out of this mess to get back to save them.

He doesn't know how he'll do it, or when, or what his explanation for his lack of being dead will be, but he knows he'll return. Somewhere along the line, they had become his life. Somewhere along the line, he'd realized that it was the one thing that made him_happy._ As happy as a fucked up individual such as he can be. He got genuine enjoyment out of spending his days entering receipts and chuckling over the outrageous things they were for. He liked acting like a general, ordering the troops around to prepare for shows. He finds himself, at times, doodling ideas for stages that he knows the boys would love on napkins-like a series of five mechanical hornets, complete with stingers, flying around the crowd. He finds himself watching the Dethklok Minute, translated brokenly in the local language, and wincing, already figuring out ways to downplay the damage before he remembers that he _can't._

He can't help them. Even though he is helping them, doing as much as he can to save them while he can. He's going to get to the bottom of this, and make sure that whoever is behind this knows that he is not a man to be fucked with. He's a determined man. He has never once, in his life, given up on anything. He got through two ivy-league schools, and went on to turn a metal band that he'd found in some dive bar into an empire. He is not going to be stopped. He is going to do whatever it takes to keep his boys safe. And right now, he can try to sleep, even though he knows it won't come.

He passes into uneasy unconsciousness anyway, for an hour or so, before he awakens out of a horrible nightmare. There's the endless, repetitive beeping, and he's standing in the middle of the ninth circle of hell, surrounded once again by high schoolers and high school dropouts, the sort of people that had been told that they'd never do anything more than ask "do you want fries with that?" and decided that it was sound career advice. The sound of the grill timer bleating out it's call to the kitchen staff, telling them to do _something_ to whatever was on it, and the sound of the friers calling out in a squeal to do the same. There's a wedding band on his finger, a reminder of a nameless, faceless, dream wife, who he knows he is trying his best to avoid. And he's worried about day-to-day bills, about what they'll eat that night, and if they can afford steak and their power bill at the same time. He's a regular jackoff, in a regular dead-end job, with a normal fucking life. And it's the most terrifying thing he's ever dreamed of in his life.

He's in a cold sweat, and he grips the handle of liquor, taking a long swig to calm his nerves. He isn't some normal jackoff, he's Charles Foster Ofdensen. He looks at his watch in the dim light, and realizes that it's five in the morning, and a reasonable hour to continue going on his way. He slides back into his boots, and leaves his pay on the nightstand. The proprietor had looked at him in shock when he'd requested the room, and he doesn't want to give the poor woman the same shock again so early in the morning. He doesn't blame her, though, he knows he looks a mess. He shoves his too-long hair out of his eyes, in something of a cruel mockery of it's usual style, and traces the scar on his cheek, a cruel reminder of his mission.

He has half a year to get to the bottom of this. Only six more months. It was how he used to get through fast-food shifts, constantly looking at the clock, and reminding himself that he had only seven more hours, or six, counting down and reminding himself that time is nothing. He could get through six more months of this, and maybe, hopefully, it'd be over and done with sooner than that. Because his boys need him, and while sometimes, he may yearn for a wife, a dog, and a white picket fence, he's come to realize that he needs his boys more than they need him.


End file.
